Inheritance

by Dani Shapiro

  But of course he could. Ben Walden could do whatever he wished, his moral high ground the guarantee of anonymity given by a long-defunct fertility institute and the dead scientist who ran it. Promised privacy. Many medical school friends. Period of time. I didn’t even need to refer to the letter—I had memorized it as I read it.

  “He’s scared,” Michael went on. And this did seem possible. The tone of this letter was different from Ben’s communication in the past. The repetition of my name, almost like a plea. Leave me alone. Don’t hurt me. Don’t come after my family. The quoting back to me of my own words about respecting his privacy—as if I might have forgotten them. The strange appeasement of his flattery, as if his praise of me as a writer might serve as some sort of consolation prize. And finally, the slammed door—quickly, almost in haste, as if he’d better act fast before he changed his mind.

  I got up and poured myself a glass of wine. I had been drinking more than usual since late June, drinking differently—medicinally—blunting the internal blows. I took a deep breath and surveyed the room around me, trying to remember that I had a life that had been going on long before I knew about Ben Walden—a life in which the man in the yarmulke on the bookshelf was my one and only dad. A life in which the boy at his bar mitzvah was wrapped in the enormous tallis of his grandfather, fastened by his great-grandfather’s filigreed tallis clips. A life of roots and certainty.

  At first my fingers itched to respond. I’m disappointed. Or: How dare you? Or: I hope you’ll reconsider. But instead of the wild, reckless abandon that had inspired my first communication with Ben, I now felt a calculating, merciless fury. I placed my laptop on the coffee table on top of a family photo album.

  “I’m not writing back to him,” I told Michael.

  I wanted Ben’s own words to echo in his ears—and I believed they might, even though I didn’t know him. Even though he was a perfect stranger. He had shown himself to be a reflective person in each of our communications. And yet: The thought of some future contacts from the children conceived by artificial insemination never crossed my mind. In the fifty-plus years since he had been that young medical student, his brief stint as a sperm donor had not haunted him. He hadn’t lain awake a single night wondering about the unknown children he might have fathered. Even when DNA testing became available—and later, when it became inexpensive and simple—the possibility of being sought out had never occurred to him.

  But he was someone who spent his life thinking about medical ethics. And ultimately, this was an ethical question if there ever was one. What did I owe him? What did he owe me? Who were we to each other?

  Michael and I left home and drove to our friends’ place on a nearby lake. It was too late to cancel, and besides, what else was there to do? I seethed with a sense of futility and powerlessness. What if Ben really was resolved to keep the door between us slammed closed? I was an unpleasant aftereffect of an action so inconsequential to him that it didn’t even bear recalling. A bit of space debris, the flotsam and jetsam resulting from a meaningless, young person’s choice.

  “Maybe this is it,” I said to Michael as we drove the winding country roads, the pretty landscape in stark contrast to the darkness inside me. “Maybe there won’t be anything more to learn. Not about my parents. Not about Ben.”

  “That’s not what’s going to happen,” Michael responded. “No way.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Too much has been set in motion. If nothing else—you know there are more half siblings out there.”

  Indeed, the likelihood of this was high. Very high. Ben had donated for a period of time. At that very moment there were probably half siblings of mine going about their lives, clueless. People who, like me, might have always been haunted by a feeling of otherness. Of not quite belonging. And the sense that there was something wrong—something secret.

  So, there would be more to come. I knew Michael was right, that this wouldn’t be the end of the story, but it didn’t set my mind at ease. My biological father had made it clear that he was done with me. The possibility of half siblings conceived through artificial insemination was bizarre and felt somehow less than human, as if we had been a litter of kittens, each placed with a different owner.

  A few days earlier, a high school friend had sent a photo she’d found of me, dancing at a sixteenth birthday party. I took in my pudgy, teenage face, my hair pulled back in a bandanna, my eyes half-closed in a self-conscious attempt to look cool and sexy. I remembered the disorder in my mind, my intense desire to please, my lack of any clear sense of myself. This is true of many teenagers, of course, but my relationship to my own identity was even murkier. That girl did not know who her father was. She was wrapped in a thick cocoon of the deepest sort of misinformation. She, quite literally, did not know where she came from. Would I ever again look at a photograph of myself, or my father, or my mother, without the eerie sense that our lives together had, from the start, been built on a lie? Would I ever look at myself and not see Ben Walden reflected back at me?

  Late that night, half-drunk, exhausted, I created a new file on my computer titled “Imaginary Responses.” In the weeks to come, each time I felt compelled to write to Ben, instead I would open the file and draft a note I knew I would never send:

  IMAGINARY RESPONSE 1

  Ben,

  For the rest of my life, when I look in the mirror, I will see your face. As I’m sure you’ve noted, the resemblance is more than striking. It would have been nice to have felt better about the face staring back at me. I wasn’t asking for much, and I gave you every assurance of privacy. I would have happily signed a waiver or a release if that would have made you feel better. For you to be unwilling to grant me these two small favors which would make a real difference in my life moving forward is incomprehensible to me.

  IMAGINARY RESPONSE 2

  Dear Ben,

  In one of my favorite short stories, Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Become Responsibilities,” written on the eve of his 21st birthday, a secondary character addresses the narrator: “You will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much.”

  I would have thought that as a person whose focus is on medical ethics, you would have considered the ethics of the situation we find ourselves in, and not fallen back on youth, or how so many others were doing it, or a paper you signed at an institute, promising privacy.

  This is a moral, ethical, human issue. And though I’m sure you have your reasons and can justify them to yourself, you’re doing something cruel and inhumane, and not taking responsibility for something you in fact did.

  IMAGINARY RESPONSE 3

  Dear Ben Walden,

  I have begun referring to you in my head as Ben Walden. Not Ben. Not “my biological father,” which is a mouthful. I need a way of thinking of you as the man who gave me life but isn’t willing to meet me for a cup of coffee.

  I feel it’s important that I clarify one thing. It seems your greatest concern is your privacy. You’ve used that word in every single communication. Donating “for a period of time” is surely what you’re most concerned about. I imagine you’re worried that I’m at the lead of a long parade of offspring who will show up unannounced at your doorstep. Which of course is not my problem. I also imagine that you were worried, had you been willing to meet me, that I might have, say, Oprah jump out of the bushes with a camera crew. I wanted to reassure you that I would never have done such a thing, that my interest was—at its deepest level—in understanding where I come from, so that I might be able to live the rest of my life in peace.

  33

  The strangest summer of my life was coming to an end—though there were no signs that fall would be any less strange. Michael, Jacob, and I were getting ready for our annual trip to Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, to the artists’ colony where I taught each August. I tried to focus on the ordinary, grounding detai
ls of daily life. There were lists to be made, of course. Always lists to be made, as if writing items in neat vertical rows might stave off randomness and chaos. I had a pile of student work to read, not to mention the usual chores before leaving home: bills to be paid, the refrigerator to be cleaned out, our dogs to be taken to the kennel. I reveled in the normalcy, but as I went through the motions, within me a pendulum continued to swing back and forth. On one side was Ben Walden—the fact of him, of his existence in the world. And on the other side was the tangled story of my parents and my continued, fervent desire to believe that they hadn’t betrayed me.

  I tried with varying degrees of success to push thoughts of Ben to the side, and to trust Michael’s certainty that more would be revealed. I wrote my imaginary responses. And I continued to read books about the practice and history of donor insemination, searching for clues, as if there might be a case study in which I would recognize my parents and all would be revealed. I combed the Internet for mentions of Edmond Farris, and finally I stumbled on a lead. A graduate student who was helping me with research was given the name of a doctor who had begun his career at Penn and remembered the Farris Institute.

  A few days before our trip to Provincetown, I made a phone date with Dr. Alan DeCherney. I was in New York that afternoon for meetings and didn’t want to speak to the elderly doctor from a noisy street corner or restaurant. I got in touch with a friend, a boutique owner, and asked if I could hole myself up in the back room of her shop for an hour. Surrounded by racks of jackets and piles of designer jeans, I opened my notebook and dialed DeCherney.

  After I introduced myself, and explained the nature of my interest in Edmond Farris and the Farris Institute, there was a brief pause on the other end of the phone.

  “It’s unbelievable that you found me,” he finally said. “I’m probably the only person alive who can tell you about Farris.”

  He proceeded to provide me with some background. From 1970 to 1974 DeCherney had been a medical resident at Penn, where the strong suit in ob-gyn was infertility. A friend of his who ran the chemistry lab had lost a toddler in a tragic accident, and he and his wife were desperate to get pregnant again but had been unable to conceive until they found Edmond Farris.

  “Were lots of people at Penn aware of Farris?” I asked DeCherney.

  “I never knew a doctor who knew him, nor a patient who knew him,” he responded. “He was off in his own little clinic.”

  As I pondered how this could have been possible, DeCherney added a detail.

  “Farris was an outlaw,” he said. “He was practicing medicine without a license.”

  * * *

  —

  My mother in the car, the darkness, the inky black of the Hudson River, the graceful arc of lights illuminating the George Washington Bridge. Institute. Philadelphia. Your father. Slow sperm. Brilliant doctor. How did I know to commit her words to memory? Not a pretty story.

  So Farris had been no brand name. My parents had gone to a back-alley rogue scientist who threw out the rulebook and got the job done. My parents were law-abiding people. What Farris was doing was lawless. How desperate must they have been as they made those trips to Philadelphia?

  “Farris had a gimmick,” DeCherney went on. “He had a way of measuring LH so he could tell when women were ovulating. The gimmick he had wasn’t fraudulent—he was onto something.”

  I thought of the story the endocrinologist Leonard Hayflick had told me about the white rats being injected with the urine of hopeful women. This was Farris’s gimmick. “The chemistry part was real,” DeCherney went on. “Years later—in 1976—it became common practice to use the LH test to time ovulation.”

  How could Farris have established his own clinic on the campus of Penn when he wasn’t an M.D.? How did he advertise in the medical school for donors? He pioneered a fertility test that in time became the gold standard, for which he never got the credit. Why was he now no more than a footnote in the history of reproductive medicine in this country? But what rose to the top of all those questions was only this: what happened once my parents had committed to Farris’s back-alley operation? What would he have told them? Was it possible that DeCherney could shed any light on an intimate conversation at which he wasn’t present?

  “What I’m most interested in,” I said, “is what my parents knew.”

  “Well, they certainly would have mixed your father’s sperm with donor sperm,” he responded matter-of-factly. “This was the practice.”

  “And they—my parents—would have been told it was happening?”

  My friend’s tiny toy poodle skittered into the back room.

  “In a way. Yes and no.”

  “What do you mean? What language would have been used? What words?” I was talking fast now, rushing, impatient. Yes and no? I couldn’t live with yes and no.

  “Your parents would have been told it was a treatment.”

  A treatment.

  Everything slowed down. Such an innocuous word. A gentle word. A medical word. A word that could mean absolutely anything.

  “A treatment for your father’s low sperm count,” DeCherney continued. “They would have been told that the treatment would help the husband’s sperm.”

  Alone in the dim back room, I felt something new. I closed my eyes and saw my hopeful parents sitting across the desk from Edmond Farris—after three, four, five inseminations with only my father’s sperm, after three, four miscarriages. Time was running out. Pru u’rvu. My educated parents, who knew something about biology, making a dark and complicated decision to hear only what they wanted to hear, and to believe only what they longed to believe.

  “By the time I finished my training, in the mid-1970s,” DeCherney said, “it was considered passé.”

  “What was considered passé?” I asked. “The mixing of sperm? Calling it a treatment?”

  “All of it,” DeCherney replied. “They eventually stopped mixing sperm because it didn’t help, and it gave people a false sense of security. I thought it was okay though,” he added.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why did you think it was okay?”

  “I mean, it all worked out. Your father never knew.”

  There it was. Four little words. Your father never knew.

  I tried to take a deep breath.

  “There always would have been a question mark,” DeCherney said. “That was the whole point. To protect the father.”

  “But what about protecting the child?” I asked. “I mean, it didn’t entirely work out. Because now I know.”

  “Precisely,” DeCherney said. He sounded almost rueful. “Now there are no more secrets.”

  34

  Ben had mentioned his children in most of his correspondence with me. It was clear that he had shared the outlines of the situation. There it was again, that word: situation. Had he told them my name? He seemed to be trying to control things. If he had shared my name, then my half siblings would be able to look me up. They could get in touch with me. They could do their own genetic testing, if they so desired. I had no way of knowing what was going on, on the other side of the country. But what I could do was continue to gather information, which allowed me to feel some semblance of control as well.

  I had a half sister and two half brothers. I had spent fifty-four years thinking Susie was my half sister, so the idea of a sister wasn’t foreign to me. But the concept of a half brother was new territory. Both half brothers were married with a couple of kids. I had already ascertained that one was an attorney, and the other worked in the tech industry. I found my half sister on Facebook and Twitter. There we both floated, digital ghosts, our two avatars among millions of avatars populating a universe made of pixels and bits that connected me to the Waldens, the Waldens to me—enabling not only the swiftness of discovery but discovery itself.

  Emily Walden had inherited her Brazilian mother’
s jet-black hair and dark eyes, but still I could see the resemblance between us. We had the same high forehead, the same proportion to our features. The details available about Emily made me think that we might easily be friends. Certainly we had a lot in common. We both had graduated from women’s colleges. Her politics were liberal. She worked for a philanthropic foundation. On Twitter, she followed many of the same people I did. Though she wasn’t particularly active on social media, it was still possible to paint a picture, however faint, of her life. She was married and had two kids, a girl and a boy. The boy looked to be the same age as Jacob.

  Michael was able to track traffic on my website and had statistics that told him how many people were on my website at any given time, how long they lingered on certain pages, and where they were from. In the weeks following Ben’s final communication, there was an unusual spike of visitors from Portland, Oregon. Was it a coincidence that several of them spent hours reading deep into my old essays and interviews—particularly those that related to family? Or that quite a few people went back to the beginning of my decade-old blog to read every post? At times I thought maybe we were imagining things. Maybe I just had some dedicated readers in Portland. But at other times I envisioned us—Ben’s family and mine—all of us reading, searching, digging toward some sense of one another, and of this unexpected turn our lives had taken. Perhaps as I was watching YouTube videos of Santa and grandchildren’s excursions to SeaWorld, they were reading essays about my father’s time with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, or my spiritual journey away from my strict religious upbringing.

  * * *

  —

  We were packing up the car for our trip to Provincetown when I heard the sound of Michael’s feet on the stairs. It was the sound of news. I was storing my power cords and computer in their carrying bag when he stepped into my office, open laptop in hand. He didn’t look stricken the way he had at the beginning of the summer, his screen displaying the DNA results that would change my life. This time he looked triumphant.